WARNING - Will probably contain some spoilers.
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
First book of the year completed! I read this whilst in Inverness last week and couldn't put it down. I must admit that I only wanted to read this series because I watched the movie. Although I greatly enjoyed the film version, as always the book was far better.
I don't want to write a comparison of the book to film, but I will say that it lacked a lot of the tension that I felt the book had. Whilst reading I was constantly fearing for Thomas's well being. The other characters have such aggression towards each other and are unpredictable in their actions, as apposed to the somewhat quick acceptance that seems to happen in the film. I understand that films have to condense what is days of character development in a book, down to an hours worth of something in a movie, but I still felt it all came a bit too easy.
There were also a few major changes that I didn't understand. The main one being the lack of telepathic communication between Thomas and Teresa. Why did they leave that out?!
I actually really enjoyed that secret bond that they had in the book and I think it helped flesh out her character a lot more. In the end I really liked Teresa.
Movie now aside what I most enjoyed about this book was, like always with me, the characters. What really draws me into a story is the characters and The Maze Runner did a good job of making me both hate and love certain people. Every moment with Gally had me wanting to slap him silly, and every time Newt panicked, or Minho spoke up I was instantly interested. The final scene with Chuck made me an emotional mess.
The story overall was pretty interesting. I'm really intrigued to know the full extent of what is going on outside the maze. It must be pretty tragic that it can force humanity to have to experiment on children in order to make a change. Even at worst I'm not sure such an act could be the best solution. The mental strain these children go through is horrific. However, as with all good stories it ends with you understanding less about whats going on and curious about what could possibly come next after such a roller coaster of a story.
Although I thought this book would most probably be aimed towards a teenage audience, and don't get me wrong it kind of is, I still really enjoyed it. I've started on the second already and was a bit disturbed by whats happened within the first few chapters of that!
Everybody's opinion is obviously different dependant on what you like to read. If you like a bit of sci-fi, and a bit of action and intrigue then this is probably the book for you. Is pretty easy to read as well.
Review over. I could say so much more but I'm not great at reviewing literature, being a pretty bad writer myself. Grammar? Pah.
I'm including this in my challenge under the trilogy, so I still have the other two to read before I can safely tick that off. I'm aware this series has a prequel book, but for the sake of this challenge I'm only going to count The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trails and The Death Cure.
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